FORTIS, Alberto. Delle ossa d’elefanti e d’altre curiosità de’ monti di Romagnano nel veronese. Memoria epistolare diretta al signor cavaliere Giuseppe Cobres, Della Società de’ Naturalisti di Berlino
Vicenza, nella stamperia Turra, 1786.
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8vo, pp. 85. Thick good quality paper, plus a final large and attractive folding plate showing an enormous fossil elephant tooth from the collection of Count Giovanni Battista Gazzola (1757-1834). Bound in contemporary pasteboard covered with marbled paper. Ink title on paper label glued to spine, a little worn. Binding still holding tight the book block. An excellent copy of a curious natural historical work.
Known mostly for his “Travels into Dalmatia” (1774), Alberto Fortis (1741–1803), was a Venetian abbot, writer, naturalist and cartographer. In 1795 Fortis was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London. His addressee, the German Joseph Paul Edler of Cobres, was born as Giuseppe Paolo Cobres (between 1737 and 1749 – 1823 in Göggingen) in the Republic of Venice. He later became a banker, private scholar, naturalist in Augsburg and a member of the Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science. This work is an account of curious findings found in the area of Verona by the Abbot Fortis, on the mountains of Romagnano. The final plates shows one of the about 1200 specimens, mainly fossils of fishes, in the personal museum of Count Giovanni Battista Gazzola.